{"id":314411,"date":"2025-08-28T06:16:42","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T06:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=314411"},"modified":"2025-08-30T05:23:57","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:23:57","slug":"review-of-gideons-spies-the-secret-history-of-the-mossad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=314411","title":{"rendered":"Review of Gideon\u2019s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spencer J. Quinn \u2013 The Unz Review Aug 24, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

I am wholly unqualified to assess Gordon Thomas\u2019 1999 work Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em> as a history of Israel\u2019s intelligence agency Mossad. Not only did I know little about the topic going in, but, given the murky and sensitive nature of the subject matter, I must assume that Thomas could publish only what the Mossad allowed<\/em> him to publish\u2014leaving out information that could harm or embarrass the agency or Israel itself. Further, given that people who work for intelligence agencies are by definition professional liars and conspirators, there is no way of telling how much of Thomas\u2019 reporting is true. Sure, he does due diligence with his research and often reports events that can be verified through multiple sources. But when he secures interviews with Mossad agents, active and retired, or when he relates events that only this or that particular Mossad agent could have experienced, was he always given the whole truth? Who knows?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Gideon\u2019s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad
Gordon Thomas
St. Martin\u2019s Griffin, 1999<\/p><\/div>\n

What I am qualified to assess, however, is the book\u2019s readability and its value as non-fiction. In both cases, Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em> succeeds well enough for an endorsement. It\u2019s tightly written, suspenseful, evocative, and in parts utterly fascinating. Unless you possess secret information because you are A) a Mossad insider, B) an intelligence community expert, or C) an enemy of Israel that Israel hasn\u2019t managed to kill yet, you will learn a lot from this book and walk away with a more realistic understanding of human nature. At least that was the case for me. As for a discourse on the just or unjust nature of Israel\u2019s occupation of Arab lands or of Zionism itself, that is beyond the scope of this review. So is assessing the justice or lack thereof behind the Palestinian cause against Israel. My goals for this review are not so noble, nor so grand. Instead, I wish to summarize the main points of the book, retell some of the juicier bits for your enjoyment, and describe in detail newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell\u2019s relationship with Mossad, which Thomas covers extensively. Maxwell, as most of us know, was a Mossad operative and the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the former associate of the late Jeffrey Epstein, whose ghost<\/a> has been in the news a lot recently.<\/p>\n

Wanting to give us a feel for a typical Mossad operation, Thomas begins by relating the agency\u2019s connection with the accidental deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed in 1997. Mossad had been grooming one Henri Paul, the assistant chief of the Paris Ritz Hotel, as a potential informant since many notorious individuals passed through his hotel. Surveillance had shown him to be quite venal in his interactions with the Paparazzi, often violating hotel policy by allowing them to photograph celebrity guests. He also had a drinking problem and a tendency to pop pills when stressed. In short, he was corrupt and vulnerable, which, according to Mossad psychologists, would make him an ideal mabuah<\/em>, or gentile informer. A Mossad katsa<\/em>, or field agent, could easily use this damaging information to persuade <\/em>Paul to let them keep tabs on whatever foreign dignitary, international terrorist, or arms dealer happened to stay at the Ritz on any given night. Thomas suspects that nonstop pressure from the Mossad spooked Paul and caused him to spiral deeper into pills and alcoholism. Whether this led to Paul\u2019s driving drunk in the wee hours of August 31, 1997, slamming his hotel\u2019s Mercedes into a concrete pillar in a Paris underpass, and killing himself and his famous passengers is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

But, as with almost everything about the shadowy Mossad, it\u2019s within the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

What follows in Gideon\u2019s Spies <\/em>is episode after episode which reveal beyond all else the ruthlessness, duplicity, and meticulousness of the Mossad. Explosions, assassinations, kidnappings, political intrigue, sexual entrapments, false identities, tapped telephones, dangerous undercover missions in the dead of night\u2014it\u2019s all there. This is real \u201cspy vs. spy\u201d<\/a> territory, but the Mossad gives it its own sociopathic dimension. It\u2019s basically Machiavelli meets the Old Testament. For instance, Mossad often incited disturbances or planted black propaganda in Arab countries not to fend off a certain threat but simply to sow distrust among the Arabs. They would also \u201ckill both sides,\u201d an expression coined by senior Mossad spymaster David Kimche. In the 1980s, the Mossad aided the Kurds in revolting against the Ayatollah Khomeini\u2019s Iranian regime, while simultaneously supplying arms to Tehran. Did they have good reasons to do all this? Or were they simply getting bored in Tel Aviv? When TWA flight 800 crashed in 1996, killing 230 people, Mossad\u2019s division of psychological warfare (Hebrew acronym: LAP) blamed it falsely on Iran or Iraq. The FBI wasted many man-hours sussing that one out.<\/p>\n

And remember Richard Jewell<\/a>, who in the same year saved lives during a bomb attack at the Atlanta Olympics and then was labeled a terrorist? Right away LAP planted the lie that he had learned his bomb-making skills in Lebanon, thus piling on the poor man\u2019s persecution. \u201cDivided, we rule,\u201d was the philosophy of 1960s Mossad director Meir Amit. His people did not spurn opportunities to divide their perceived enemies, which according to Thomas could be anyone at any time.<\/p>\n

Former CIA director William Casey once compared his agency to the Mossad thusly:<\/p>\n

A nation creates the intelligence community it needs. America relies on technical expertise because we are concerned to discover rather than secretly rule. The Israelis operate differently. Mossad, in particular, equates its actions with the country\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n

More colorfully, Casey referred to 1980s Mossad general director Nahum Admoni as \u201ca Jew who\u2019d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.\u201d Of course, this is the same CIA which was responsible for Operation Mockingbird<\/a>, MK Ultra<\/a>, and selling crack cocaine<\/a> in America\u2019s inner cities in the 1990s. So we should take Casey\u2019s words with a big grain of salt.<\/p>\n

Thomas doesn\u2019t exhaustively compare the Mossad with intelligence agencies from other countries, so it remains unclear whether Mossad was or still is more ruthless or duplicitous than its competition. Probably not. But according to Thomas, the Mossad may be the world champion of meticulousness. Its operations tend to be extremely well rehearsed, its agents extremely well prepared, and its eyes everywhere.<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the Six Day War in 1967, there was either a Mossad katsa<\/em> or an informer inside every Egyptian air base and military headquarters. There were no fewer than three in the General High Command headquarters in Cairo, staff officers who had been persuaded by Meir Amit. How he had done so had remained his closely guarded secret.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the Mossad, Israel knew exactly where and when to strike the Egyptians. Amit was assured of the war\u2019s outcome before the first shots were even fired.<\/p>\n

Here Thomas describes how a katsa<\/em> had to prepare for a secret mission inside Saddam Hussein\u2019s Iraq in 1990:<\/p>\n

A dialect coach sat with him for hours, listening to him repeat the Sufi\u2019s patois. Already fluent in Farsi and Arabic, Shalom quickly grasped the dialect of the tribesmen. Every night he was driven to a different part of the Negev to sleep, never more than dozing, then move to another place to avoid the instructors he knew were hunting him. Discovery would almost certainly mean his mission would be either postponed for further training, or assigned to another katsa<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As would be expected, Thomas gives us the blow-by-blow of Mossad\u2019s 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. It was masterminded by Mossad\u2019s longtime deputy director and Nazi hunter Rafi Eitan<\/a>, whose cutthroat attitude was apparently still legend at Mossad headquarters when Gideon\u2019s Spies <\/em>was published. This was the man who hunted down and executed the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. John le Carre based the central character of his novel The Little Drummer Girl <\/em>on Eitan.<\/p>\n

Eitan also greenlit the treachery of US-born Jewish traitor Jonathan Pollard<\/a>, who, as a naval intelligence officer, handed over more than a thousand classified documents to Israel in the mid-1980s. Pollard was arrested and given a life sentence in 1985, but was released in November 2020. After the Gaza War began on October 7, 2023, Pollard took to the internet to passionately report on the Israeli forces\u2019 suspiciously slow response<\/a> to the attacks, which allowed over a thousand Israelis to be killed or taken hostage. It\u2019s almost as if they knew of the attack in advance and then let it go on for hours in order to drum up a casus belli <\/em>for a war which has now taken between 50,000 and 80,000 Palestinian lives and ethnically cleansed nearly 2 million people from Gaza. Would the Mossad be cold-blooded enough to do such a thing? Based on my reading of Thomas and my assumption that the worst of the agency had been kept from him, I would have to say, again, it is within the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

Another telling episode was the 1961 spat President John F. Kennedy had with Israeli president David Ben-Gurion. Kennedy was naturally opposed to Israel acquiring nuclear weapons since he wanted good relations with the oil exporting countries in the Middle East. Thus he insisted that the International Atomic Energy Agency regularly inspect Israel\u2019s nuclear facility at the Dimona settlement in the Negev Desert. This infuriated Ben-Gurian, who instructed a Democratic fundraiser named Abraham Feinberg to turn the screws on Kennedy. \u201cMake the putz understand the reality of life,\u201d he told Feinberg. This Feinberg did, and not for the first time. When Kennedy was running for office, Feinberg had offered him half a million dollars, telling him that, \u201cWe are willing to pay your bills if you will let us have control of your Middle East policy.\u201d This time around he warned that an inspection at Dimona would cost him Jewish financial support in the next election. Nevertheless, Kennedy stuck to his guns.<\/p>\n

Even more galling, when inspectors came to Dimona with weeks\u2019 prior notice, the Israelis had rigged the place to look like it wasn\u2019t producing nuclear bombs. And the inspectors, who could not speak Hebrew, fell for it. Rafi Eitan was behind this sleight of hand, as well the smuggling of fissionable material out of a nuclear material processing company in Apollo, Pennsylvania, whose owner and chief executive were, predictably enough, also Jewish.<\/p>\n

(Recently unredacted files reveal that this brazen theft happened under the nose of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who may very well have the Mossad\u2019s mole<\/a> in the agency. Thomas, of course, had no way of knowing this when he wrote Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em>, and mentions Angleton only sparingly.)<\/p>\n

So does this add up to the Mossad assassinating John F. Kennedy? To say that they would have been cold-blooded enough is no great shakes because any<\/em> intelligence agency would have been had they found Kennedy sufficiently annoying. How many times did the CIA try to assassinate Fidel Castro? But did the Mossad have the wherewithal at the time to do it? I would say yes. They had katsas <\/em>everywhere in the United States, with at least one monitoring the White House. Finding some ideologically damaged radical (or radicals) to pump out long-range shots at the President\u2019s motorcade in Dallas doesn\u2019t seem like a stretch for a perspicacious reptile like Rafi Eitan.<\/p>\n

Yes, but did they do it? Unfortunately, Gordan Thomas doesn\u2019t give us enough information one way or the other. You will have to go to other sources<\/a> to answer that question. The evidence may be circumstantial, but it\u2019s not beyond the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

As for Robert Maxwell<\/a>, it went down like this. In 1984, Maxwell (born J\u00e1n Ludv\u00edk Hyman Binyamin Hoch), who owned the English Mirror<\/em> newspapers, became the Mossad\u2019s most well-connected sayan<\/em>, or Jewish volunteer, in England. He was overbearing, impetuous, arrogant, bombastic, abrasive, and accustomed to high living. Yet he was a schmoozing genius and had access to some of the most influential men on the planet. Unsurprisingly given his daughter\u2019s future behavior, he was obsessed with sex and was described by one of his senior reporters as \u201ca sexual monster with a voracious appetite for seducing secretaries on his staff.\u201d He also laundered his papers\u2019 pension funds to a Mossad bank account so adroitly that he left \u201cfraud investigators awed by his skilled duplicity.\u201d Such skills enabled him to broker a deal between the Mossad and the KGB which laundered the profits of an Israeli company called ORA during the Iran-Contra affair. When Eitan needed someone to sell rigged surveillance software to intelligence services across the globe, he went to Maxwell. Maxwell also doxed Mordechai Vanunu<\/a>, the whistleblower technician who revealed Israel\u2019s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona. Vanunu was in hiding when the Mirror<\/em> published a large photograph of him and smeared him as a fraud. This led to sayanim<\/em> and katsas <\/em>in England finding him, sexually entrapping him, and taking his drugged body back to Israel where he was questioned, tried in secret, and imprisoned for 18 years. 11 of those he spent in solitary.<\/p>\n

Despite treating Maxwell like a king in Israel, the Mossad made sure to bug his hotel rooms and keep him well supplied with food, drink, and prostitutes. They obtained video footage of him in all sorts of sexually compromising positions. Things got frosty as Maxwell\u2019s financial difficulties increased. Not only was he unable to pay back loans from Israeli investors which allowed him to purchase his newspapers, but it was revealed that he had skimmed some of ORA\u2019s profits for himself. With characteristic chutzpah, Maxwell then demanded the Mossad not only pay back his pension fraud money, but also that they free Vanunu so Maxwell can publish an exclusive interview with him in his struggling newspaper. If the Mossad refused, who knew what damaging secrets this big-mouthed newspaper magnate could spill? Yes, he stupidly made that threat to Mossad director Nahum Admoni. It was allegedly at that point when the Mossad had decided that Robert Maxwell had to go.<\/p>\n

According to Thomas, in November 1991, they had a katsa <\/em>lure Maxwell to Spain and then to the Canary Islands via his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine<\/em>. While at sea, two men in a dinghy boarded the vessel, overpowered Maxwell, and injected an air bubble into his jugular, killing him almost instantly. (You will read about none of this on Maxwell\u2019s Wikipedia<\/a> page.) Despite his ignominious demise, the Israelis gave him highest honors at his funeral at the Mount of Olives. While Thomas mentions neither Ghislaine Maxwell nor Jeffrey Epstein in Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em>, the notion that either or both could have worked for the Mossad in some capacity is, again, not beyond the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

Believe it or not, I am leaving out some of the best parts of Gideon\u2019s Spies.<\/em> These include Mossad\u2019s connection to the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II (no, they didn\u2019t do it), the idealistic young Arab mabuah<\/em> that they so coldly betrayed, the raid on Entebbe affair, the Mossad\u2019s collaboration with BOSS, the security apparatus of Apartheid South Africa, as well as the agency\u2019s numerous high-profile failures and embarrassments. One particularly ghoulish contretemps occurred in 1984 when the Mossad attempted to smuggle ousted Nigerian minister Umaru Dikko out of England. The man was discovered in an airport hangar unconscious in a crate. Cooped up beside him was an Israeli physician with \u201ca syringe in his hand ready to increase Dikko\u2019s drug intake. There was an endotracheal tube in Dikko\u2019s throat to stop him from choking on his own vomit.\u201d Furthermore, the spy-vs-spy wrangling in Africa became, shall we say, spicy during the latter part of the Cold War. The Mossad\u2019s rivalry with CSIS, the Chinese intelligence agency, was especially vicious<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thomas reports:<\/p>\n

For three years, Mossad waged its deadly war of attrition against the CSIS over the length and breadth of Africa. There was no mercy on either side. When a CSIS hit team ambushed a Mossad katsa<\/em> in the Congo, they fed him to crocodiles, filming his last moments in the water and sending the footage to the local Mossad station chief. He retaliated by personally firing a rocket into the building from where the CSIS operated. Three Chinese were killed.<\/p>\n

Despite being a thrilling read, Gideon\u2019s Spies <\/em>sheds little light on some of the burning mysteries of today. Aside from the Mossad\u2019s potential connection to the Kennedy Assassination or Jeffrey Epstein, many of us would also like to know whether they were behind 9-11, as Wyatt Peterson recently claimed<\/a>. I also explored the Israel-9-11 connection<\/a> a couple years ago at Counter-Currents<\/em>, as well as transcribed Carl Cameron\u2019s<\/a> banned Fox News coverage of it from December 2001. Unfortunately, none of this circumstantial evidence can be found in Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em>. Given its publication date, it\u2019s unlikely that it would be.<\/p>\n

Throughout, Thomas maintains a measured respect for the Mossad that does not jeopardize his journalistic integrity. He\u2019s not anti-Semitic, but nor is he servile to Israel or Jews. He may betray a slight pro-Israeli bias, but it\u2019s nothing beyond the pale for a mainstream journalist in 1999. He\u2019s also perfectly willing to expose all that is ugly, cruel, dishonest, and frankly sleazy about the Mossad. He would have to, being their biographer, despite what respect for them he may hold. In the 1990s, former Mossad operatives Ari Ben-Manashe<\/a> and Victor Ostrovsky<\/a> had each published books revealing insider details which severely damaged the agency. For example, Ostrovsky alleged that the Mossad had actually plotted to assassinate President George H. W. Bush in 1991. Could Gideon\u2019s Spies <\/em>have been a Mossad attempt at damage control? Who knows? Again, it\u2019s not beyond the realm of possibility\u2014especially considering that Thomas weirdly ends his book not with a proper conclusion but with the prediction that with all its failures, the Mossad is always one SNAFU away from having a new director general appointed. Was this uncharacteristically soft landing a way of humanizing the Mossad?<\/p>\n

My reading of Thomas however leads me to one rock solid conclusion\u2014that Israel is not and never was an ally of the United States. From the very beginning, it was monitoring Americans and stealing from Americans. Thomas reports:<\/p>\n

In a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA had identified Israel as one of six foreign countries with \u201ca government-directed, orchestrated, clandestine effort to collect US economic secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

And not just economic secrets. Military secrets, computer secrets, nuclear secrets, sexual secrets, any secrets, really\u2014all of it was on the table. Perhaps the most telling evidence of Israel\u2019s perfidy\u2014worse in my opinion than the attack on the USS Liberty\u2014was how in 1983 the Mossad knew damn well that the 1983 attack on American marines in Beirut was going to happen. They were supposed to inform the CIA and didn\u2019t. Even worse, they were live monitoring<\/em> the bomb-laden vehicle as it plowed full speed into Marine headquarters, killing 241 service members. According to Victor Ostrovsky, a Mossad officer callously said afterward of the Americans: \u201cThey wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, to be fair, no one should resent the Israelis because the Mossad is good at what they do. Gordon Thomas certainly doesn\u2019t, and good on him for that. I am sure the CIA has done some nasty things to Israel as well. I have no doubt the CIA bugs and monitors Israelis every chance they get\u2014in the US and abroad, in embassies, and in Israel itself. Of course, they should. Further, if the Israelis ever have something worth stealing, I sincerely hope the CIA would filch it as remorselessly as Israel has filched from the United States. I\u2019m sure that law and ethics are little more than fanciful luxuries in the cutthroat world of spy vs. spy. Therefore I am willing to give wide latitude to the Mossad. But when billions of dollars move in only one direction in the relationship between America and Israel, that\u2019s when we should start resenting the Israelis. It\u2019s one thing to lose your secret stuff to talented spies; that comes with the territory when you run a country. It\u2019s something else entirely to lose your secret stuff, while<\/em> getting your pocket picked, while<\/em> listening to your pocket-picker whisper sweet nothings about how he\u2019s your greatest ally, while<\/em> this same pocket-picker wants you fight his battles for him, while<\/em> this selfsame pocket-picker is willing to smear you as a Nazi if you dare run your mouth about any of this.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a hardened anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to see how abusive and one-sided this relationship is. And although I\u2019m sure this wasn\u2019t Gordon Thomas\u2019 intention, this is the conclusion one cannot help but draw after reading Gideon\u2019s Spies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(Republished from The Occidental Observer<\/a> by permission of author or representative)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It doesn\u2019t take a hardened anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to see how abusive and one-sided the relationship between Mossad and the CIA is. And although I\u2019m sure this wasn\u2019t Gordon Thomas\u2019 intention, this is the conclusion one cannot help but draw after reading Gideon\u2019s Spies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314413,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314411\/revisions\/314413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}